7 Best Practices for Thank You Pages

After someone has clicked your Call to Action and then completed the form on your Landing Page, it’s time to deliver the content you’ve promised. The biggest building block of Inbound Marketing is to provide our audience with great content isn’t it? Your Thank You page is where you start to build a trusting relationship. It’s best practice to thank someone in real life when they give you something. It’s no different when someone gives up personal information online. We will outline 7 Best Practices to make sure you are optimizing this step in your visitor’s journey to becoming a customer.

7 Best Practices for Thank You Pages

1. Deliver Content
The most important aspect of any Thank You page is making it easy for visitors to get to the content they have been waiting for. How to get the content needs to be obvious immediately. Also, if you’ve promised somebody 10 Facebook Hacks in return for their email address, don’t give them 15 Twitter List and Analytics Tools. We have to always keep SEO in mind, so make sure your offers and the content delivered are consistent. If it’s a case where a visitor will be getting a follow-up from you before the offer is completely deliver, set very clear expectations.

2. Provide Directions
Tell the users exactly what to do. “Click Here to Download” is a great example because a visitor knows exactly what to do and what will happen next. Assume they know nothing about how to get to your content and provide simple, concise directions throughout the process to minimize confusion. If you make it hard, people won’t get to the content, get frustrated and then go tell others about their negative experience. We want happy users. Make it simple.

3. Include Social Options
Now that you have provided great content, make sure the visitor can tell all their friends. Highlight the difference between social buttons that SHARE the content and social buttons that will allow visitors to ENGAGE your social page. When someone shares the content they’ve received, they should actually be sharing the landing page/form they filled out, not the actual content. Redirect people to the landing page and get more leads! Always encourage people to engage with you, but make sure they can tell the difference.

4. Encourage Exploration
After you have given over your content, you want to keep creating value for your visitor. Because you wanted your customer to focus on the landing page content, you took away other pages or content from your site. Now that they’ve completed the form and received content, you want to bring back options to explore. Make sure they can search through a few things that you have created that are relevant to the topic.

5. Bring Back Menus
You also removed the Menus from your pages up to this point. Return them so that visitors have the option to view other sections of your site. Hopefully, your content will be compelling enough for them to continue their research about your brand. If you’ve been doing your persona research and tracking keywords, you should be able to point them a certain direction on your site based on where they are in their buying journey.

6. Include New CTA
A pleased visitor is one that will be willing to participate more. If your content has proved valuable, a customer may not only search around on your website. They may be willing to take the next step. Take time to tailor this new CTA to your buyer’s journey. If someone subscribes through blog posts on doing social media well, maybe entice them with CTA that leads to a free social media starter guide.

7. Analyze and Reach
One way to really do 6 and 7 well is to be using the data available to you. The awesome part about Inbound Marketing is that every step is measurable. See what visitor respond to most and optimize areas that are lacking. It’s great to see someone follow all your steps and convert, but you need to send out an almost immediate “Welcome” email, newsletter or promotion in conjunction with your Thank You page.

Inbound Marketing is all about creating quality content to attract potential customers. Thank You Pages come after a Calls to Action and Landing pages. They deliver the valuable content. Our Inbound Marketing blog series has started with this process to highlight it’s importance before we explore other Inbound topics. If you have any questions about the benefit of Inbound Marketing or how the Call to Action-Landing Page-Thank You Page can increase your conversion rate, click the link below for a Free Consultation.